Hi all,
I was about to raise the issue of conversion today, and I noticed
several others mentioned it as well, so it's time ...
The conversion tools that were used by KDE can be found in
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/~fouvry/kde/kde-db.tgz.
The most important one is linuxdoc2docbook.perl. The others are
wrappers and auxiliary scripts. Unfortunately, they won't run
straight-out-of-the-box, as there is some KDE specific stuff.
Given a linuxdoc document, I can give you the converted document to
`judge' the result. (And adapting them should not be too hard ;-)
We considered using sgmltools, but the DSSSL was too imprecise and too
hard to control (as it is a one-off conversion, there is no point in
spending a very long time getting the DSSSL to create the output as
you like - the DSSSL language has *no* global variables and
side-effects, which is nice to some extents, but it makes some
problems much harder to solve). The perl script (which can be
modified very easily) uses the package sgmlspl, which in turn needs
(n)sgmls, but that should be available if one works with SGML ...
The following decisions should be made before the conversion can start:
- Do you use a DTD with an LDP formal identifier (strongly
recommended: KDE uses PNG instead of GIF, and PNG is not provided in
docbook (yet)): -//LDP//DTD DocBook V3.1-Based Variant V1.0//EN
It is obvious that it should not be abused to define new elements
(new general entities are allowed)
- What is the level of the converted document: book, article, or still
something else? We have taken book, but I think that article is
better for small documents (we took book because book had the just
toc on the first page and no text - *very* bad thinking, especially
since I know now how to make articles behave similarly ... But
there are some reasons _for_ books as well).
- What do you do with the file names of HTML files? You can keep the
default or use section IDs to generate tags from it (in which case
you'll have to enforce use of ID attributes - see KDE DTD).
(The colour issue raised in some messages is completely different and
has to do with the style sheets. If you desperately want white
background, then use something like
(define %body-attr%
(list
(list "BGCOLOR" "#FFFFFF")
(list "TEXT" "#000000")
(list "LINK" "#aa0000")
(list "STYLE" "font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;")))
in the style sheet)
Frederik Fouvry
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